Friday, May 28, 2010

Jefferson County, Alabama's most populous county, with some 665,000 residents, is shouldering about $5 billion of debt, most of which was issued to overhaul its sewer system in the mid-1990s. But the county's real troubles stem from a 2003 refinancing of the original fixed-rate bonds and a corrupt local government that accepted kickbacks in exchange for mangling the county's portfolio.

Harrisburg, Penn.

Pennsylvania's capital owes $68 million in bond interest payments this year -- $3 million or so more than its entire annual budget. The Harrisburg Authority, the governing body that issued the bonds to construct a state-of-the-art trash incinerator, has already been unable to make several payments, and now the county government, which footed the bill last year for a $775,000 swap fee, is suing for the funds.

Detroit

To make up for a 2010 budget shortfall of $280 million, Detroit issued $250 million of 20-year municipal notes in March. The issuance followed on the heels of a warning from city officials that if its financial state didn't improve, it could be forced to declare bankruptcy. Nonetheless, demand for the bonds was high, thanks in large part to a guarantee that the state would make the payments if the city became insolvent. Michigan has already proved that it has few qualms about stepping in. In early 2009 the state took over the Detroit Public School System, which was facing a budget deficit of more than $300 million. Now a governor-appointed "emergency financial manager" oversees every penny spent.

If you were to guess what parties have run these cities for the past half millennium or so would you guess republicans or democrats?

Let's face it, Detroit is a given. There hasn't been a republican in city government there since the advent of the wheel.

But honestly I wasn't sure about Harrisburg and Jeff Co. so I did some research. Here is what wiki has on the current Harrisburg city council........

How about Jefferson County. Surely, there has to be at least one republican. In fact, republicans have had a 3-2 majority on the commission since 2006. but here's the skinny on Jeff. Co....

Since Collins assumed the commission presidency in November 2006, when she led a majority of three Republicans, her tenure has been rocky.

The county soon was consumed by a financial mess, driven by complex financial deals made during the leadership of her predecessor, Democrat Larry Langford, the former commissioner and Birmingham mayor who was convicted in October of 60 counts of corruption related to some of those deals.

In the midst of that quagmire and arguments over whether the county should seek protection in what would be largest government bankruptcy in U.S. history, Collins broke rank with her fellow Republicans -- Jim Carns and Bobby Humphryes -- and formed a majority coalition with the commission's two Democrats.

Once again democrats lead the charge of running a county into the ground.

The bottom line is this. If you want your city/state/country to turn into festering, puss filled, cesspool, then vote for liberals. They'll do all the work for you.

"Brazil has the highest tax-to-GDP rate in the Western Hemisphere and guess what — they're growing like crazy," Clinton said. "And the rich are getting richer, but they're pulling people out of poverty."

In 1950, Detroit was the wealthiest city in America on a per capita income basis. Today, the Census Bureau reports that it is the nation's 2nd poorest major city, just "edging out" Cleveland.

Once again, we have a case of "progressives", who seem to have enough of a thought process to believe in the global warming canard but cannot seem to grasp that liberal policies turn perfectly functioning organizations into..... well..... Detroit.

Back in 2008, when I was fulminating against multiculturalism on a more or less weekly basis, a reader wrote to advise me to lighten up, on the grounds that “we’re rich enough to afford to be stupid.”

Two years later, we’re a lot less rich. In fact, many Western nations are, in any objective sense, insolvent. Hence last week’s column, on the EU’s decision to toss a trillion dollars into the great sucking maw of Greece’s public-sector kleptocracy. It no longer matters whether you’re intellectually in favour of European-style social democracy: simply as a practical matter, it’s unaffordable.

How did the Western world reach this point? Well, as my correspondent put it, we assumed that we were rich enough that we could afford to be stupid. In any advanced society, there will be a certain number of dysfunctional citizens either unable or unwilling to do what is necessary to support themselves and their dependents. What to do about such people? Ignore the problem? Attempt to fix it? The former nags at the liberal guilt complex, while the latter is way too much like hard work: the modern progressive has no urge to emulate those Victorian social reformers who tramped the streets of English provincial cities looking for fallen women to rescue. All he wants to do is ensure that the fallen women don’t fall anywhere near him.

So the easiest “solution” to the problem is to throw public money at it. You know how it is when you’re at the mall and someone rattles a collection box under your nose and you’re not sure where it’s going but it’s probably for Darfur or Rwanda or Hoogivsastan. Whatever. You’re dropping a buck or two in the tin for the privilege of not having to think about it. For the more ideologically committed, there’s always the awareness-raising rock concert: it’s something to do with Bono and debt forgiveness, whatever that means, but let’s face it, going to the park for eight hours of celebrity caterwauling beats having to wrap your head around Afro-Marxist economics. The modern welfare state operates on the same principle: since the Second World War, the hard-working middle classes have transferred historically unprecedented amounts of money to the unproductive sector in order not to have to think about it. But so what? We were rich enough that we could afford to be stupid.

Peggy Noonan can finally see that the emperor has no clothes...............

I don't see how the president's position and popularity can survive the oil spill. This is his third political disaster in his first 18 months in office. And they were all, as they say, unforced errors, meaning they were shaped by the president's political judgment and instincts.

There was the tearing and unnecessary war over his health-care proposal and its cost. There was his day-to-day indifference to the views and hopes of the majority of voters regarding illegal immigration. And now the past almost 40 days of dodging and dithering in the face of an environmental calamity. I don't see how you politically survive this.

The president, in my view, continues to govern in a way that suggests he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen. This is a terrible thing to see in a political figure, and a startling thing in one who won so handily and shrewdly in 2008. But he has not, almost from the day he was inaugurated, been in sync with the center. The heart of the country is thinking each day about A, B and C, and he is thinking about X, Y and Z. They're in one reality, he's in another.

I continue to fall back on the fact that this clown never had a track record of running anything including but not limited to a lemonade stand.

People like Noonan, Brooks, Parker, and Buckley incense me because they're supposed to be a part of self proclaimed right wing intelligentsia but somehow would never seem to listen to the gun and god clinging, yahoo, red necks who kept screaming "This guy hasn't run anything!!!!!!!!!"

For Noonan and company, their support of this guy was no more than an affirmative action play. They so loved the idea that they could vote for an articulate, thoughtful, positive black guy that they totally ignored the fact that "this guy hasn't run anything!!!!!!!"

But now they feel victimized because they believe they were sold a bad bill of goods.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon called on the Canadian government to consider changing its policy requiring Mexicans to get visitors' visas before visiting Canada.

"We sincerely hope that the solution this Parliament is studying, through comprehensive amendments to the refugee law, will also serve as a bridge that will enable us to renew our exchanges of our visitors," Calderon said in an address before a joint session of Parliament.

"We thoroughly respect Canada's right to make decisions regarding its immigration system. I cannot, however, fail to convey to you our regret at those incidents and those decisions."

You mean to tell me you can't just go into Canada without documentation? How draconian.

Hours after he fell to the ground clutching his stomach Monday night near Lake Calhoun, Derrick Martin became more than the latest Minneapolis homicide victim.

His killing was a chilling chapter in what police and other sources say has become a dangerous feud among gangs, one that has caused an uptick in the city's murder rate after several years of decline.

It also has everyone from beat cops to pastors to the mayor fearful of what lies ahead this summer if the feud escalates. Some of them say the volatile new gangs are less organized and harder to control than gangs of a decade ago.

"They don't want to listen to anybody," said Bishop Richard Howell of Shiloh Temple International Ministries, a North Side church that's worked with troubled youth. "They just want to retaliate."

Martin's killing was the city's 20th so far this year -- a tally now higher than all of last year -- and it was particularly brazen: He was walking on a heavily used bike path on the lake's west side when he was ambushed. Investigators say they're worried that fellow gang members will avenge his death.

Go to a restaurant to the Golden Gate city and get this on your check...........

I was at dinner with friends at Little Star last weekend, and we were splitting the check. "Looks like the health care surcharge here is 50 cents a person," said one of them, fingering the bill, and suddenly my mood flashed from cheese-stuffed and content to angry. It's been almost three years since the Healthy San Francisco initiative started up and these surcharges gradually started appearing. And it's been two years since the sight of that receipt line has soured my feelings about places that print it.

You'd think that after sharp rebukes from local critics, blogger shaming, and three whole years that restaurateurs would suck it up and absorb the charge into their prices. But many are still determined (stamp foot here) to show us how much we're paying to provide their employees with health insurance.

You'd also think that after seeing these fees so many times, I'd have grown resigned to them. The reason I still get mad when I see a surcharge listed separately on the check, though, is that I quit cooking to pay off a medical bill.

I will say this for life in "Progress" city over life our here in Redville. There's never a dull moment.........

Four shootings took place within an hour Wednesday night in Cincinnati, but all four victims should survive, according to police.

An individual called 911 around 10:15 p.m. reporting two people shot on Saffer Street and hung up, according to a Cincinnati emergency dispatcher.

When police arrived to the scene in Westwood they found two men suffering from gunshot wounds. One was grazed and the other had been shot in the leg, according to Cincinnati police Capt. Jeff Butler.

Less than an hour later, police were called to the 5400 block of Winneste Avenue in Winton Hills, first to aid a woman who had been shot in the thigh and 15 minutes later for a man shot in the foot in the home next door.

Medical conditions for the shooting victims were not immediately available Wednesday night.

C'mon Redville we don't have four shootings in a decade. Let's step up our game. All we have to do is start electing democrats and we can have a just as great of a community as our cities have.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Part of what caused my transformation from a bleeding heart liberal to a libertarian was the acceptance of enough humility to realize that I don't know everything. In fact, maybe the most important piece of knowledge to accumulate over time is the knowledge that you don't know crap.

See, liberals know it all; they know what public transportation you should be using, the appropriate size of your house, what schools you should be forced to attend, how many calories your meals should be, what seat belt you should strap on, what your sodium intake should be, etc..... I should know because I used to believe I knew it all.

But none of that means my world view doesn't pose ethical/moral challenges to my thinking.

Dexter Burroughs was going to attend Cincinnati State and Technical College after being accepted into the surgical tech program.

But that plan will never be.

In death, Burroughs' purpose could be to shut down Club Ritz or possibly create a citywide policy where a homicide at a bar would shutter a venue for good.

Burroughs, 21, who grew up in Kennedy Heights, was gunned down inside Club Ritz in the early morning hours of May 16 after a confrontation with the shooter. Roughly 700 people were inside the club. Still, the gunman - described as a young black man wearing a red shirt - was able to escape the club and elude police.

The shooting death is the second inside the bar since 1998. There have been multiple shootings outside the bar, including three on Valentine's Day.

Peggy Burroughs stood above her son's casket and clung tightly to the lectern late Tuesday morning.

Raising her bowed head, she looked into a sea of more than 300 mourners at Avondale's Zion Baptist Church and said her son's death needs a purpose.

"There's going to be a purpose," she repeated a few times.

Burroughs' father, Ehling Burroughs, has been staging a protest outside the club since his son was killed. He's put up posters on the windows and has renamed the club as "Club Homicide."

About 10,000 signatures have been collected calling for the club to be closed for good, Hope Dudley said. Dudley created the petitions and even addressed City Council about Club Ritz back in February. On Sunday, she went to the club and spoke to Burroughs' father.

Now here's the dilemma. As a libertarian, I think the owner of this club should be able to keep working his club as he sees fit. After all, the 700+ people who were in that club all knew the risks of this place. The gansta reputation is what attracts people to the joint. Dexter Burroughs knew this when he went into the place that night. You won't see old Gordon in this place because I know everyone in there is a walking target.

But this belief is at odds with my belief that a local community should be allowed to "police it own". After all, if I had a property next to this place, I'm suffering in real economic loss by having the OK Corral (without the charm) right next door.

In addition, if this place closes, the thugocracy that graces this club at night is just going to migrate somewhere else creating a whole new public hazard.

I'd be interested in others thought on this issue. Should the community be allowed to close this club and why? What about the owner of this business, who simply provides the community what they want and he has 700 customers to prove it?

They called it ParadiseI don't know whyYou call some place ParadiseKiss it Goodbye

If you are not familiar with the lyrics above it is the chorus for the song The Last Resort by the Eagles. The song is one of many on the Hotel California album speaking to life in the not so golden state. Of course, the album is over 30 years old now and seems so prophetic when reading about the ails of a once great state ruined by "progressive" politics...........

The Democrats who control the Legislature have fired their opening salvo against Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's spending blueprint, which proposed eliminating California's welfare program and cutting deeply into other state services, by proposing that the state rely instead on billions of dollars in new taxes to balance the budget.

The Assembly's Democrats detailed a plan Tuesday that would tax oil companies and borrow billions from the nickel-and-dime deposits that consumers make on recyclable bottles and cans. Tax breaks for businesses that are scheduled to take effect soon would be delayed under the plan.

A day earlier, Democrats in the Senate had begun debating a nearly $5-billion tax plan that would delay the same corporate tax breaks and extend both a hike in personal income taxes and a reduced dependent-care credit that are set to expire in December. Vehicle license fees would rise by $1.2 billion. Taxes on alcohol would increase 60%.

Did it ever occur to anyone in Sacramento that all these tax increase just might push business and residents out of the state; thus resulting in even lower revenues to the state?

Somehow the state is usually a little less tolerant when you owe them..........

Thousands of Rhode Island income-tax refunds are being delayed longer than previously reported because of state cash-flow problems.

Overall, the state has delayed payment of about 53,000 individual income-tax refunds — totaling about $36.3 million — to make sure it has enough money to pay off state borrowings that come due in June, said Paul L. Dion, chief of the state Office of Revenue Analysis.

When the issue first arose earlier this month, state officials said they were delaying payment of refunds by about three weeks after the returns were processed. As of Tuesday, however, the delay had grown to between four and six weeks, state officials acknowledged.

Normally, when a tax return is processed, it takes the state several days to issue a refund on a return that was filed electronically, a week or so for a return that was filed on paper, state Tax Administrator David M. Sullivan said.

The state Division of Taxation has received numerous complaints from taxpayers who have called the agency looking for their refunds, Sullivan acknowledged. “Our call volume is up,” he said. Meanwhile, several legislators on Tuesday introduced a bill (H 8167) that would force the state to pay interest sooner than required on delayed refunds. One of the bill’s sponsors, state Rep. John J. Loughlin II, R-Tiverton, said, “It’s a fundamental issue of fairness.” Refunds represent “money that belongs to the people who earned it,” and the state should pay them promptly, said Loughlin, a candidate for Congress.

Seizing people's money through withholding and refusing to give it back?

One of the efforts being pushed by urban "progressives" are these mammoth Thomas the Tank Engine projects in most of our cities.

This morning I happened to run into this blog pushing the plan for Cincinnati.

It appears that everyone wants to use the Portland rail as the model for theirs. But watch this video of the Portland rail. As you watch the cars go by, do me a favor, look inside the cars and see the number of passengers actually on the car.

You have to believe that when the Portland folks put together the video, they probably did most of the shots during rush hour to show the great demand for the rail system. But most of the footage shows the cars less than half full.

This is the best case for one of these deals? It seems to me that Portland might have been able to turn this into a tourist attraction because these things are so rare and the fact that all these city leaders are taking junkets to Portland to "investigate" their system. Kind of like the first commercial aquariums and IMAX's were popular until every city had one.

My suggestion to these fantasies for street cars. Lets buy Thomas the Tank Engine DVD's for all the proponents.

Hopefully, they'll sit in front of the TV memorized by the Alec Baldwin narration and at least won't be in public blowing billions of dollars on these white elephants.

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Last week, one of the millions of workers hired by Census 2010 to parade around the country counting Americans blew the whistle on some statistical tricks.

The worker, Naomi Cohn, told The Post that she was hired and fired a number of times by Census. Each time she was hired back, it seems, Census was able to report the creation of a new job to the Labor Department.

Below, I have a couple more readers who worked for Census 2010 and have tales to tell.

But first, this much we know.

Each month Census gives Labor a figure on the number of workers it has hired. That figure goes into the closely followed monthly employment report Labor provides. For the past two months the hiring by Census has made up a good portion of the new jobs.

Labor doesn't check the Census hiring figure or whether the jobs are actually new or recycled. It considers a new job to have been created if someone is hired to work at least one hour a month.

One hour! A month! So, if a worker is terminated after only one hour and another is hired in her place, then a second new job can apparently be reported to Labor . (I've been unable to get Census to explain this to me.)

Here's a note from a Census worker -- this one from Manhattan:

"John: I am on my fourth rehire with the 2010 Census.

"I have been hired, trained for a week, given a few hours of work, then laid off. So my unemployed self now counts for four new jobs.

The news that President Barack Obama and his family will return to Chicago for the Memorial Day weekend has triggered a guessing game.

Where will they dine? What will they do for fun? With the Sox on the road and the Blackhawks skating into the Stanley Cup finals, might the first family ditch its predictable pastimes -- basketball, golf and tennis -- and go to the United Center for hockey?

According to a White House official, the Obamas will arrive Thursday and stay until Monday, when Obama will participate in a Memorial Day ceremony at Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery in Elwood. The veterans' cemetery is about 50 miles south of Chicago.

Here's what I'll guarantee. I'd bet a lot of money that he'll get another bourgeoise golf game in.

Paychecks from private business shrank to their smallest share of personal income in U.S. history during the first quarter of this year, a USA TODAY analysis of government data finds.

At the same time, government-provided benefits — from Social Security, unemployment insurance, food stamps and other programs — rose to a record high during the first three months of 2010.

Those records reflect a long-term trend accelerated by the recession and the federal stimulus program to counteract the downturn. The result is a major shift in the source of personal income from private wages to government programs.

The trend is not sustainable, says University of Michigan economist Donald Grimes. Reason: The federal government depends on private wages to generate income taxes to pay for its ever-more-expensive programs. Government-generated income is taxed at lower rates or not at all, he says. "This is really important," Grimes says.

Because I get that sending Janet Napolitano and Ken Salazar to the gulf doesn't do a damn thing to get the oil spill cleaned up. In fact, it appears that the government's role in regulating these platforms was never done in the first place, making Jan and Ken culpable in the spill.

Another example of how so called government watchdogs become lazy hounds.

Like it or not, it's going to be the private sector that comes up with a solution to this spill. Jan and Ken can stand around and watch but if we put them in charge of cleaning this up, it will never happen.

Public officials in Maryland often justify their excessive spending of other people's money by pretending to be champions of the poor and downtrodden. Don't fall for it. Maryland is just one of many states that apply for -- and keep -- Social Security benefits that legally belong to children in foster care.

This is happening to tens of thousands of foster kids nationwide, says Dr. Daniel Hatcher, associate professor of law at the University of Baltimore. Child welfare agencies regularly file for Social Security benefits that should go to orphaned or disabled foster kids, then pocket the money in their budgets, leaving their young charges with no financial resources when they leave the system at age 18.

Since Social Security benefits legally belong to the minor child, whoever receives the money has a fiduciary responsibility to spend it in the child's best interest. This is a broad standard, but padding bureaucratic budgets doesn't even come close.

Ninety percent of the Social Security Administration's "representative payees" are government agencies, even though they're supposed to be the least preferred custodians of foster children's benefits.

The SSA even set up an automated "kiddie loop" to expedite the transfer of funds so bureaucrats don't have to work so hard to get at the dough. "Picking the state agency is the easiest choice," Hatcher points out, adding that there's nothing in SSA regulations that allows for this practice.

Monday, May 24, 2010

A decade or so ago, I dated a fabulously liberal woman who resided in New York City. During one of our many political debates, I asked her what was so wonderful about city living.

I got that whole Cultural experience and Broadway lecture..... typical from your average urbanite. Nevermind that she'd been to the Guggenheim once (with me) and that she'd never seen a Broadway show or been to the Bronx Zoo. To her these amenities actually meant something even though she'd never found a reason to use them.

All those conversations flooded my memory bank as I started reading this piece from Reason.......

You want a quick indicator of urban decline in any city you visit? Ask a local what’s great about the place. If the top three answers include “a world-class symphony orchestra,” you’re smack dab in the middle of a current or future ghost town.

This orchestra axiom is something I divined while working on Reason Saves Cleveland With Drew Carey, an hour-long documentary you can see at reason.tv/cleveland. Time and again, I’d ask Clevelanders—a proud breed beaten down by decades of lake-effect snow, economic degradation, population decline, and gridiron disasters worthy of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland (“I had not thought death had undone so many”)—to tell me what was still top-notch about their hometown. It didn’t matter if I was talking to a CEO or a homeless man, a bar owner or a barfly. The inevitable reply: “We’ve got a world-class symphony orchestra,” typically embellished with some transparently phony claim about how it compares to those in other cities (“It’s in the top 15 or 20 in the world!”), as if orchestras are regularly ranked like NCAA basketball teams.

Such are the thin straws at which residents in drowning cities grasp. Such is the psychic depravity that failed polities inflict on their residents, the mental tics and habits of mind that both compensate for and reinforce the steadily diminishing material conditions that drive down the quality of life. The job losses, the economic stagnation, the grim depopulation of downtowns and residential neighborhoods have a psychological dimension that is every bit as punishing and effective in keeping terminally ill cities in their sick beds as high taxes, stifling regulations, and municipal corruption. Talk to the people left in cities on the skids, and you’ll quickly hear some variant on one or more of the following: If only heavy industry hadn’t gone south, if only Standard Oil or Boeing or Consolidated Fuzz or the Browns hadn’t moved, if only the weather were different, if only the blacks or the Puerto Ricans or the Italians or the bohunks or the unions or the Jews or the Bilderbergers or air conditioning hadn’t ruined it all.

From the year 2000 to 2006, Cleveland's population has dropped from 478,403 to 444,313. When the next census numbers come out, it will be even lower.

Sidney Independent and his followers have tried to convince me that population emigration has nothing to do with politics. I guess it's just some random phenomena where populations fleeing cities like Cleveland and Detroit are all run by democrats and liberal policies.